My digital communications teacher recently told us about something called “passion projects.” We have been assigned to do said “passion project.”

My project is something I’ve been working on for about a year now. I’m planning on finishing a short story that I started writing after I had a somewhat strange and graphic dream a month or so before that. I have about 5 weeks to finish this, so I’m probably going to get a little stressed, as I can’t work on it anywhere except for school. Hopefully, by the time it’s over, I’ll have a full-length story ready for publishing.

Freemium games are rampant across game downloading services such as Google Play or the App Store. These games, which are free to download and play, usually force one to pay for items in the app itself, such as weapons or premium currency to buy said weapons. When it’s all said and done, these games aren’t “free to play” as they are advertised.

However, this is not the case with Kritika: The White Knights, a free-to-play hack n’ slash game developed by South Korean publisher Gamevil. I find this a welcome departure from the endless wave of games that force you to pay to git gud.

In most games, to get premium currency, you play the game for what seems like forever and you get maybe three or four pieces of it. In Kritika, you can earn 25 karats, the premium currency, per day per character. They don’t force you to spend your hard-earned money on a game.

They also give you a chance to buy special weapon packages every five levels. Thankfully, by then, you’ve had enough chances to get that Legendary-grade weapon, so you don’t have to spend money.

This is just one of the reasons I love Kritika. The other is that the gameplay, though it’s just the simple formula of attack and use skills, is addicting at its core. Games don’t need to have a complicated attack, block etc. combat system to be good. In addition, the skills are eye-popping. Killing an enemy rewards one with a satisfying flash of color and the game itself isn’t over-challenging, even in later levels where enemies deal anywhere from 1,000 to 20,000 damage.

Even when run on minimum system requirements, the app still runs almost flawlessly, which is a surprise with how much goes on on screen at one time. There are usually 20 to 30 enemies on screen at once and they attack almost simultaneously. The graphics are also great for a mobile game, with an endearing comic-book style.

My one complaint about the game is its lack of a story. Before a stage, there’s some text that gives you a small idea of what’s happening, but mostly you’re just thrown into a stage without an idea of what’s actually going on. At the beginning of the game, however, it gives you a background story that you can keep track of easily.

All-in-all Kritika is a great F2P (free-to-play) game that people who don’t have a credit or debit card can enjoy as much as people who do.

Follow these laws, and always obey the will of the Glasses. Deny the Monocle and his evil ways. Do not fall to his temptation. The Glasses are the way, the love and the life. May you live your life praising your Holy Saints. May you find enlightenment at the claws of the Gandhiraptor.

Follow these rules, or may you be smote by anger of our Lord the Glasses.

In my digicomm class, we were told to look at a LifeHack.org article about the top applictations and such that a student should have, and we were told to write about two to five of the assorted applications and such in the article.

Gmail

Gmail is Google’s email system. As I use it often for two classes, I would say that it is very useful, if not essential for my everyday life. If I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t be able to keep up with my newspaper assignments and my digital communications class assignments, and I wouldn’t be able to do my stuff from home as often as I do. Without it, newspaper and digicomm would be too hard and stressful.

Google Docs

Google Docs is, of course, Google’s system of writing documents and saving them. What helps is that you can access those documents from everywhere, as they are stored on the cloud. You don’t need to lug around a laptop and USB drive to start working on those precious documents. Docs, as well as Gmail, is essential to my newspaper writing.

Mind42

MInd42 is a website used for brainstorming and/or making organizational graphics for presentations. As I have trouble staying organized, this website would be a great tool for my daily life, and, once again, for newspaper. Plenty of my newspaper assignments could go for some organization, so I can form coherent ideas and sentences. The competition judges seemed to think so, at least. Either way, it would be great for me to use, and for anyone with bad organization skills.

Both Google services are essential to my daily life, as stated, but I have yet to use Mind42. I’ll probably start using it eventually, and I might write a blog post about it by itself. As I have no idea what any of your tastes are, I won’t recommend you use them, as you can use them when and if you feel like it. Leave a comment telling me what you think of these.

In my digital communications class, we did the “Google Yourself” challenge. After looking at the rules/tips for Googling yourself, I proceeded to go to the search engine and let it stalk me.

The point of this exercise was to see whether our digital footprint/tattoo was positive or negative, or whether it existed at all. What I found was… almost nothing.

After searching just my name, I found out that a photographer has my name. I didn’t look at their photography, nor did I care, but it was semi-interesting nonetheless. After typing in the city that I live in, along with my name, “Undisclosed Undisclosed, Undisclosed,” I found only my Facebook profile and my staff profile/stories from my high school newspaper’s website.

Now, onto my reflection about my digital footprint. We were asked whether our digital footprint is positive or negative. After what I saw, my digital footprint doesn’t seem to positive or negative, for the most part. My Facebook profile didn’t really have much. Some music and posts about video games, occasionally some stuff about anime and other subjects, but nothing that lifts me up or puts me down. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I could always try and put stuff on Facebook that could make me seem like a better person, because that could help me get a job or get into college.

Searching my online persona brought up an account on World of Warcraft. As I’ve never played WoW, this wouldn’t affect me if my employers decided to take the time to search my online persona. If I DID play WoW, that would probably lower their opinions of me.

In Digital Communications, we recently watched a TED video about 12-year-old Adora Svitak. She talked about the topic of childishness, and how it is not an age-specific word. One of the first things she brought up is that adults refer to younger people as childish, and yet the adults are the ones who are most childish. She brings up that adults cause most of the worlds problems, including World War II. I didn’t see how this was considered “childish” in the sense of the word. Starting a war is not childish, unless you’re Brazil and France, and the war is over lobster. Complaining is childish.

She also brought up that adults staunch creativity in younger people. Though this may be true, she also says that younger people can have great ideas. One example I can think of that this is untrue is this. This is definitely not a great idea, though it may be creative.

Though there may be famous people I find inspiring, I don’t know anyone personally who is inspiring. That’s probably sad, but it’s the truth. Not very many people can become an inspiration in my life. The only one I can think of is my cousin in Texas. Just two years ago, she was being abused by her mother who was addicted to cocaine, and she was called crazy and thrust into a mental hospital against her whim. She’s been through a lot and is still going strong.

I don’t think that adults who heard her presentation will give children more of a chance to share their ideas. That’s just how the world works. It may not be fair, but the world isn’t fair at all. That needs to be learned by children. If they were to learn that, then maybe we wouldn’t have problems like what Svitak talked about.

Svitak’s presentation skills, however, are far from childish. She had better presentation skills than the past two presidents, which I guess isn’t saying much. But, in all seriousness, she had very mature presentation skills. She wasn’t afraid of eye contact and she didn’t look at her notes too often. Overall, she had very commendable presentation skills.

In my own presentation, I think I did fairly well. Aside from a few minor mistakes on my part, like pausing and leaning, I did pretty well for a presentation. I don’t do presentations often, so I think it was good.

Welcome to the Digi-Journalism blog. I made this blog because my teacher made me. I plan on posting stuff about journalism and my class assignments, and may or may not post other things unrelated to the world of journalism. At the end of the year, I may or may not delete this, and all blog posts with it, because I probably won’t have anymore use for it. So, enjoy it while it’s here, and feel free to leave comments on my posts.